Pick up any article or watch any talk on a testing-related topic these days, and you’re bound to see the terms “shift left” and “shift right”. They’re almost a cliché. What do they really mean? Modern software development isn’t supposed to be linear anymore, right? There’s not one point where it starts and another point […]
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I had the luxury of working on a terrific team at a financial services startup from the early 00s to the early 10s. Though we jelled as a self-organizing agile team with expert domain knowledge, we occasionally made some really dumb mistakes when deploying to production. The operations VP, Anne, wagged her finger at us […]
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In February I wrote about the experimental retrospective format for our team’s “cross-pod retro” (so-called, because our large team is divided into smaller pods). Since then, my manager Jo Webb and I have continued to tweak the retro format, based on feedback from surveys done following each retro. Building on feedback Our teammates said they […]
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We use our story telling and critical thinking skills constantly as we test and develop software. How often do we practice those skills on something other than features we are going to release to production? Musicians practice their craft. Even coders can practice their craft with katas and code retreats. How can we practice telling […]
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I’ve written a lot about pairing over the years, most recently about strong-style pairing with others on my team. Pairing is an excellent way to transfer skills, it offers a lot of advantages for overcoming cognitive biases when testing, and it’s just plain fun. For most of the 4.5 years I’ve been on my current […]
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We hope you’ll join us at Agile Testing Days in Potsdam this December, and we invite you to join our tutorial on Day One! Our tutorial title is “Exploring Features and Stories: How Testing Helps Build Shared Understanding”. Lots of words – what do we mean by that? What might you learn in our hands-on […]
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